Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Bill Nye's dismissive comments on the
afterlife should have appeared on a site called "Little Think." Like many other "skeptics," Mr. Nye
seems to be unaware of the serious research done on out-of-body phenomena, near
death experiences, reincarnation, and possession using a variety of methodologies,
done by competent professionals and published in scientific journals.

Tanzania has suffered an outbreak of Mandarin Fever. A comment on “Learn Mandarin to Break Language Barrier for a Brighter Future, Students Told,” in the Daily News (Tanzania).

The enthusiasm for Mandarin in many countries today is based on the false premise that Mandarin will become a very important international language. It is true that Mandarin is the most widely spoken first language in the world with 1.2 billion speakers but English is the most widely spoken language in general (native speakers and non-native speakers) with about 1.5 billion. And English far more useful world-wide. It is the international language of science, aviation, and business.

A second premise is that Mandarin is essential for doing business with China. Over 300 million students are now studying English in China, which is about the same number of fluent English speakers in the United States – former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman observed that China may soon be the largest English-speaking country in the world. It is challenging for any Mandarin student to achieve the level of competence in Mandarin necessary to do business, but there are many Chinese English speakers who are at that level now.

Nevertheless, acquiring some Mandarin is a very good idea, as long as our expectations are reasonable and the method is correct. It can lead to a better understanding and appreciation of the astonishingly rich Chinese culture. For those interested in languages, exposure to Mandarin, a language completely different from those we have studied before, is a profound experience. I am a beginning Mandarin student: Mandarin classes, using a very effective and pleasant method called TPRS, have taught me a tremendous amount about how language is acquired.

Saturday, August 27, 2016

"The following statement somehow showed up on my Twitter feed the other day:'Spontaneous reading happens for a few kids. The vast majority need (and all can benefit from) explicit instruction in phonics.;This 127-character edict issued, as it turned out, from a young woman who is the 'author of the forthcoming book Brilliant: The Science of How We Get Smarter' and a “journalist, consultant and speaker who helps people understand how we learn and how we can do it better.”It got under my skin, and not just because I personally had proven in the first grade that it is possible to be bad at phonics even if you already know how to read. It was her tone; that tone of sublime assurance on the point, which, further tweets revealed, is derived from “research” and “data” which demonstrate it to be true.Many such 'scientific' pronouncements have emanated from the educational establishment over the last hundred years or so. The fact that the proven truths of each generation are discovered by the next to be harmful folly never discourages the current crop of experts who are keen to impose their freshly-minted certainties on children. Their tone of cool authority carries a clear message to the rest of us: 'We know how children learn. You don’t.'"So they explain it to us.The 'scientific consensus; about phonics, generated by a panel convened by the Bush administration and used to justify billions of dollars in government contracts awarded to Bush supporters in the textbook and testing industries, has been widely accepted as fact through the years of “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top,” so if history is any guide, its days are numbered. Any day now there will be new research which proves that direct phonics instruction to very young children is harmful, that it bewilders and dismays them and makes them hate reading (we all know that’s often true, so science may well discover it) — and millions of new textbooks, tests, and teacher guides will have to be purchased at taxpayer expense from the Bushes’ old friends at McGraw-Hill."

You won't be surprised to learn that the "consensus" reached by the National Reading Panel on the value of intensive explicit phonics instruction has been challenged. Professor Elaine Garan of Fresno State University re-examined the National Reading Panel's own data and concluded that the impact of intensive phonics instruction is strong only on tests in which children read lists of words in isolation; it is minuscule on tests in which children have to understand what they read. In my own work, I have found other studies showing the same thing. Study after study has shown that performance on tests of reading comprehension is heavily influenced by the amount of self-selected free voluntary reading that children do, not whether they have had intensive systematic phonics. This conclusion is consistent with the views of Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman who have, for decades, presented strong evidence that our ability to decode complex words is the result of reading, not the cause. Garan's work was published in very prestigious and respectable places but for some reason it has not gotten the publicity it deserves. Stephen KrashenGaran, E. (2001). Beyond the smoke and mirrors: A critique of the National Reading Panel report on phonics. Phi Delta Kappan 82, no. 7 (March), 500-506.Garan, E. (2002) Resisting Reading Mandates. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.Krashen, S. 2009. Does intensive decoding instruction contribute to reading comprehension? Knowledge Quest 37 (4): 72-74.

Monday, August 22, 2016

"Colleges cutting ties with the SAT" (August 22) is supported by research. In a study published in 2007, UC Berkeley scholars Saul Geiser and Maria Veronica Saltelices found that adding SAT scores to high school students' grades in college prep courses did not provide much more information than grades alone. In 2009, William Bowen, former President of Princeton University, Matthew Chingos, Senior Fellow of the Urban Institute, and Michael McPherson, President of the Spencer Foundation, reached similar conclusions in their book Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Universities.

In other words, it appears that teacher evaluation of students does a better job of evaluating students than standardized testing does: The repeated judgments of professionals who are with students every day is more valid that a test created by distant strangers.

Friday, August 19, 2016

Dave Pierce ("Early Learning," letters, August 19) is tired of reading stories about failing schools. Mr. Pierce thinks the problem is parents who don't make their children do homework, but there is good evidence that the problem is that the media gives the public the impression that our schools are much worse than they are.

Every year, national polls report that people rate their local schools much more positively than they do schools in the US in general. In last year's Gallup Poll, 70% of parents said they would give the public schools their oldest child attended a grade of A or B, but only 19% would give public schools in the nation A or B.

The explanation: Parents have direct information about the school their children attend, but their opinion of American education comes from the media. For decades, the media has been reporting more academic failure than actually exists.

American schools are doing quite well: When researchers control for poverty, American students' international test scores rank near the top of the world.

Monday, August 15, 2016

August 15, 2016.The low ranking of US students on international tests (“If your child's school is failing, thank a union," foxnews, August 15) has nothing to do with unions. There is overwhelming and consistent research that it has everything to do with poverty. When researchers control for the effects of poverty, American students rank near the top of the world. Also, middle class American students in well-funded schools score very well on international tests. About 25% of American children live in poverty – the highest level of all industrialized countries, and in some urban districts, 80% of students live in poverty. This is the reason for our mediocre overall scores. Poverty means poor nutrition, poor health care, and underfunded school libraries, which means little access to books. Spending on schools is NOT directed at protecting students from high poverty families from the effect of poverty.Real reform means less spending on useless tests and computers – let's only spend on tests and technology demonstrated to help students. Instead, lets spend on making sure no child is left unfed, no child is without proper health care, and every child has access to good libraries and helpful librarians.

Stephen KrashenWebsite: www.sdkrashen.comAuthor: The Power of Reading (2004, second edition, Libraries Unlimited).

Original article: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/08/15/if-your-childs-school-is-failing-thank-union.html

If LAUSD wants to raise graduation rates (editorial, August 14), it might consider investing more in libraries and librarians.

LAUSD students scored far below the national average on the national reading test (NAEP) in 2015; these scores are closely connected to how much students read on their own.

Research also tells us that more reading means better grammar, spelling, vocabulary, writing and more knowledge of literature, social science, and science, all crucial for school success.

Research consistently shows that students read more when they have more access to books. LAUSD students have very little access to books at home, in their communities, or at schools.

According to the Times' article, "The Poverty Gap," the national level of poverty is 15%. But 80% of LAUSD students live at or below the poverty line. Students living in poverty have far fewer books in the home.

In 2015, Los Angeles ranked 68th out of 77 American cities in public library quality.

In LAUSD's school libraries the books-per-student ratio is 35% below the state average.

The presence of a credentialed librarian is related to reading achievement. LAUSD has one teacher-librarian for every 5,784 students, the national average is one per 1,026.

The low graduation rates are no surprise.

Stephen Krashen

original article: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-credit-recovery-courses-20160814-snap-story.html

Friday, August 12, 2016

Melinda Gates still thinks that teacher quality is the
problem in American education. Of course we should always be trying to improve
teaching, but there is no teacher quality crisis in the United States: When
researchers control for the effect of poverty, American students score near the
top of the world on international tests. Our overall scores are
unimpressive because of our unacceptably high child-poverty rate, now around
21 percent. The problem is poverty, not teacher quality.

Poverty means food deprivation, lack of health care
and lack of access to books. Each of these has a strong negative influence on
school performance. Let’s forget about developing new ways of evaluating
teachers, fancy databases and other ideas from Gates that have no support in
research or practice. Instead, let’s invest in making sure no child is left
unfed, no child lacks proper health care and all children have access to quality
libraries.

Stephen Krashen

Published
at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/?utm_term=.e7e537687288

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Proposition
227 dismantled bilingual education in California. But Proposition
58, which would reverse much of Prop 227, has "has so far generated only the slightest
ripple of attention."("Not
a bang but a whimper: bilingual ed ban’s likely exit," August 8, The Cabinet
Report).

The following
appears close to the end of the article: "The
education community, backed up by piles of research, never embraced the tenets
of Prop. 227 …."THIS IS A RARE MENTION OF THE STRONG RESEARCH SUPPORTING
BILINGUAL EDUCATION. Despite the many attempts of some of us to share the
results of this research with the public, it never became part of the debate in
1998 and is peripheral today.Why?In the final sentence of the aritlce, the founder of the
California Tea Party Coalition is quoted: “(Removing the bilingual ban) seems
like such a disservice to kids, because everything they are going to need and
everything they are going to do is in English.”THE RESEARCH CONSISTENTLY SHOWS THAT PROPERLY ORGANIZED BILINGUAL
EDUCATION IS VERY GOOD FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT. THOSE IN BILINGUAL
PROGRAMS DO BETTER THAN COMPARISONS ON TESTS OF ENGLISH READING. THIS IMPORTANT
FINDING WAS NOT PART OF THE DISCUSSION IN 1998, AND STILL APPEARS TO BE UNKNOWN IN
2016. Why?

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

The problems described in "STAAR Struck" (August 7) can eventually be solved, or at least reduced enough to stop complaints from coming. The testing boondoggle will continue, however, with more and more testing in various forms, despite evidence that more testing does not lead to more achievement.
I suspect that the tests are flawed on purpose, in order to encourage resistance and debate over details. When repairs are made, it will give critics a sense of accomplishment, while they forget what the real problem is: huge sums of money wasted on tests that have never been shown to do students any good, while genuine educational needs are unmet.
Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Ron Unz is wrong when he states that "Bilingual education programs fail our students," (Aug 5). Contrary to Unz' claim, the passage of Proposition 227 in 1998, which dismantled bilingual education, did not result in better English proficiency.It is true that English learners' Stanford 9 scores went up after 227 passed, but so did scores of all students and subgroups in California. A new version of the test was introduced the year before the English-only law was passed. Scores increased each year as students and teachers became more familiar with the test, a well-documented pattern when new standardized tests are introduced. Careful scientific studies have shown no obvious improvement in English language development resulting from the passage of Prop. 227.Also, experimental studies consistently show that students in bilingual programs outperform comparison students in all-English programs on tests of English reading.

Stephen Krashen

sources:Crawford, J. and Krashen, S. 2015. English Leaners in American Classrooms. Portland: DiversityLearningK12Jepsen, C. and de Alth, S. 2005. English learners in California schools. San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of CaliforniaMcField, G. and McField, D. 2014. "The consistent outcome of bilingual education programs: A meta-analysis of meta-analyses." In Grace McField (Ed.) The Miseducation of English Learners. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing. pp. 267-299.Parrish, T. 2006. Effects of the Implementation of Proposition 227 on the Education of English Learners, K–12: Year 5 Report. American Institutes for Research and WestEd.

original article: http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/aug/05/utbg-bilingual-prop58/

Friday, August 5, 2016

Language
Experience was frequently used and discussed several decades ago, but is not
mentioned much these days, possibility because there is no chance for
publishers to make money from it. It
was popular in first grade classes for native speakers of English in the United
States, but it can easily be used in first or second language development, for
beginners up to low intermediate of any age, and could be a powerful source of
written comprehensible input.

There
are several versions of language experience, but they all are in agreement with
Hall's definition (Hall, 1978): "... a method in which instruction is
built on the use of reading materials created by writing down children's spoken
language." (p. 2).1

Here is
one simple manifestation:

1.The
student dictates a very short story or anecdote to the teacher.

2.The
teacher writes out the story or anecdote (these days using a word processor)
and makes copies of the story.

3.The
student and other students read the story, which could become part of the
classroom library.

Current
research and theory predicts that language experience will work: It is
compelling comprehensible input,and
fully utilizes one of the most powerful ways of making input compelling:
personalization. The stories children dictate are usually about themselves,
their interests, and their lives. Language experience thus has a strong
similarity to TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Story Telling), a
method of teaching second languages that relies on stories co-constructed by
teachers and students (Ray and Seely, 2015). Studies thus far show that TPRS is
effective for second language acquisition (Dziedzic, J. 2012; Varguez, K. 2009.
Watson, 2009; Pippins and Krashen, 2015).

I
present here a brief review of language experience research.None of the studies used exclusively language
experience.In every case, it was mixed
with

direct
instruction (e.g. word attack skills, phonics).Comparison groups always had direct instruction as well, so this is probably
not a serious confound. Except for McCanne (1966), allstudies in table 1 deal with English as a
first language.

Table 1
presents only grade one2 results for "Paragraph Reading"
tests in which children have to understand what they read. The results
presented here agree closely with the Bond and Dykstra (1967) presentation of
the Hahn, Kendrick, Stauffer and Vilsceket. al. (reported as Cleland, p. 127-8) studies , in which means were
adjusted for pretest performance on measures of word reading, vocabulary,
spelling, letter names, IQ and other tests (table 46, p. 75).

(a)A third group did language experience as well,
but also included instruction in the International Teaching Alphabet.The experimental group did slightly better
than the ITA group (d=.13) and the ITA group outperformed the basal comparison
group (d = .13).The Language Experience
group did about twice as much self-selected reading than the other groups,
reading an average of 15.5 books in a month in grade 2.

(b)Significance fell just short of the .05 level,
one-tail, with t = 1.60 (df = 108), p = .056. The difference was easily
significant at the .10 level.Calculation by SK.

(c)Effect sizes (ES) were calculated from data
presented in journal papers, but this was only possible in two cases.

(d)Harris and Serwer point out that the basal
reader method "held a slight lead ... It was associated with slightly but
significantly highest results in meaningful silent reading comprehension"
(p. 634). Unfortunately, it was not possible to calcualte the effect size.

(e)McCanne reported that "reading
comprehension" included two subtests, but did not describe the tests.

Table 2:
Research summary

positive

no dff

negative

Dissertations

2

Journal papers

3

3

grant report

1

Total

5

1

3

The
scorecard presented in table 2 shows a slight advantage for Language Experience,
with the advantage coming from dissertation research. Dissertation research is
sometimes thought to be lower quality than published research, but Glass, McGaw
and Smith (1981) concluded that dissertation reearch is of slightly higher
quality in terms of design than published research (p. 51). Also, experimental
effects reported in dissertations are typically lower than effects reported in
published studies, reporting less support for favored hypotheses (p. 67, 226).

Note
also that the advantage for the basal group in Harris and Serwer (1966), while
significant, was "slight" (comment d, table 1) and the results of
only one study are firmly negative (Kendrick and Bennett, 1966).

This is
a crude analysis: There was a wide variation in procedure among the studies
(see Vilscek, 1968) and details of several studies were not available to me. The
only commonality is that reading is largely done from texts dictated by the
students.

What is
clear, however, is that language experience deserves another look, under more
carefully controlled experimental conditions.Language experience stories have
tremendous potential: They are free, and can form the basis for a classroom
library, and can be easily shared on the internet.

Notes

(1) Some
history: "The story (of language experience) begins over sixty years ago
[this article was published in 1965] when Miss Flora J. Cooke, a teacher at the
Chicago Institute, later at the Francis Parker school, Chicago, began
experimenting with a 'natural' method of teaching beginners to read through
recording on the blackboard the children's oral expressions relating to current
experiences. Miss Cooke stated her hypothesis concerning this innovation.
Children may learn to read as naturally as they learn to talk, she said ... She
found that the children readily learned to read records she prepared of their
own experiences without following any particular method of teaching
reading." ( p. 280). (From Hildreth, 1965).

(2) Language
experience for older children (grades 2 and 3) sometimes included self-selected
reading (Harris, Serwer, and Gold, 1967).Such a study is no longer a test of language experience alone, but is
still a test of the more general Comprehension Hypothesis.It should be pointed out, however, that
regular book reading happened in grade 1 studies as well. In Vilscek, Morgan,
and Cleland (1966), a first grade study, children "transitioned" to
"instructional reading in trade books" when each child reacher the
"primer instructional level" (p. 35). Another first grade study,
Kendrick and Bennett (1966) included reading library books and stories from
textbooks as "reading activities" as well as language experience (p. 95).

References

Bond, G.
and Dykstra, R. 1976. The cooperative research program in first-grade reading
instruction. Reading Research Quarterly 2(4) (Entire issue).

Dziedzic,
J. 2012. A comparison of TPRS and traditional instruction, both with SSR.
International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 7(2): 4-6.

Vilscek,
E. 1968. What research has shown about the language-experience program. In
Vilscek, E. (Ed.), A Decade of Innovations: Approaches to Beginning Reading.
Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Convention, International Reading
Association. Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association. pp. 9-23.